Programming PHP

examples, and you are strongly encouraged to steal/borrow as much existing code as
possible (with proper attribution, of course).
Software Tools
To write an extension, you need to have working versions of these tools installed:
• bison
• flex
• m4
• autoconf
• automake
• libtool
• An ANSI-compliant compiler such as gcc
• make
• sed, awk, and Perl are also used optionally here and there
These are all standard tools available free on the Internet (see http://www.gnu.org for
most of them). If you are running a Linux distribution or any of the BSD operating
systems, follow your distribution’s mechanism for installing new packages. In Windows,
you can install the cygwin environment to run tools such as bison, flex, and
autoconf, doing the final build using Microsoft Visual DevStudio.
Building Your First Extensions
This section walks you through the steps of building your first extension, from
design through testing. Most extensions are created by writing a file that defines the
functions the extension will have, building a skeleton from that, and then filling in
the C code that does the actual work of the extension. This section doesn’t cover
advanced topics such as returning complex values or managing memory—we’ll talk
about those later, after you have the basics down.
Command-Line PHP
Unless your extension can really be tested only through the Web, it is much easier to
debug and quickly test your code through the command-line version of PHP (also
sometimes referred to as the CGI version of PHP). To build the command-line version,
do something like this:
% cd php4
% ./configure --with-mysql=/usr --with-pgsql --with-zlib --with-config-file=/etc
% make
# make install
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